Max Welling was born on 22 October 1968 and is 58. He earned a physics PhD at Utrecht University in 1998 with a thesis on quantum gravity, supervised by Gerard 't Hooft.
He moved into machine learning and joined the University of Amsterdam. In 2013 he co-founded the spin-out Scyfer. Qualcomm acquired it in August 2017, and he became vice president of technology at Qualcomm Netherlands.
He later became a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science in Amsterdam. He shared the Koenderink Prize in 2010 and was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.
In 2024 he co-founded CuspAI with Chad Edwards and became chief technology officer. CuspAI uses AI to find new materials for carbon capture and chips. It raised $450M at a $2.6bn valuation in July 2026.